News Press Release

Open Control Architecture (OCA) Alliance Announces Official Incorporation

Pro Audio Companies Now Working Together on Global Media Networking System Control Standards for Full Interoperability

Seattle, October 2, 2012 – The Open Control Architecture (OCA) Alliance, the industry collective developing a media networking system control standard for professional applications, today announced that it has been officially incorporated as a non-profit trade association.

The incorporation represents the latest milestone for the Alliance, which was founded in June 2011 to develop a standardized control and monitoring architecture for professional media networks.

Since its founding, the Alliance has moved rapidly, releasing initial technical documents to its Observer members in October of 2011, and the complete OCA 1.0 Specification to the Observers in May of 2012.

In the coming months, the Alliance will transfer the Specification to a public standards organization for ratification as an official open public standard, free for all to use at no cost. Subsequently, the Alliance will actively support the standards-making process, and will at the same time promote and support the adoption of OCA as a tool for the professional media systems industry.

“Incorporation represents another major step forward in the creation of a robust, feature-rich media networking control solution,” said Terry Holton, Senior Manager – Product Planning at Yamaha R&D Centre. “We are making significant progress, with excellent participation from all our founding member companies.”

Bob Tudor, Presonus CTO added, “the cooperation between the founding members was critical to the success of OCA 1.0. We are achieving cross-brand control of parameters in our devices as a result, which is good for our respective customers and a stimulus for market growth.”

Nathan O’Neill, LOUD’s VP Engineering, notes “a key aspect of the OCA specification has been to allow for common control functionality yet provide manufacturers the ability to customize the protocol to their own needs, much like MIDI Sysex messages… in this way they get the best of both worlds – the ability to control functions across a multi-manufacturer system, yet the ability to keep manufacturer-specific algorithms proprietary”.

“With the OCA Alliance moving forward, integration of an audio system with a media control system will definitely get a lot simpler,” commented Marc Weber, Product Manager, d&b audiotechnik. “This means that the integrator can concentrate on the interface to the user rather than on the actual programming itself.”

In its new role as a trade association, the Alliance invites all interested companies to join. The former Observer membership status has ended — it is no longer necessary, since the Specification is now public — but there are new membership options that will allow both large and small companies to participate in the further development and adoption of OCA generally.

“Opening the Alliance to a broader mass market is a pivotal step for the future – the ground work has been done and we are now at the leading edge of what will be the most dominant of all networking technologies. With input from a broader industry group the standard will evolve and provide a wider range of affordable solutions.” says Graham Hendry of TC Group. “Another very encouraging aspect is that we are not limited only to audio applications; we have received very encouraging interest from manufacturers looking to add video and monitoring control to the specification.”

OCA defines a flexible and robust control standard that complements media-transport standards such as AVB. By adding standard system control to the media-network equation, OCA will allow devices from multiple manufacturers to share common controllers. This will allow seamless user experiences of multivendor systems.

OCA addresses the full range of professional media-networking use cases, from small to very large, and includes critical and life-safety applications.

OCA is adaptable and future-proof and will support multi-vendor media-network applications now and in the future.

The Alliance will work to ensure that the OCA will become widely adopted, enabling comprehensive multivendor interoperability in which media-network customers have an increased range of choice and engineered media networking solutions offer new levels of functionality, flexibility, and overall value.

About the OCA Alliance

OCA Alliance is a non-profit corporation formed to secure the standardization of the Open Control Architecture (OCA) as a media networking system control standard for professional applications. The OCA Alliance’s purpose is to actively promote the adoption and standardization of Open Control Architecture (OCA) as a media networking system control standard through marketing, education and training and to develop future standards and other documents that augment, enhance or extend the primary OCA standard for the purposes of enabling and promoting increased interoperability and reliability for a variety of transport standards.